Friday, 5 October 2012

Still Counting The Dead

Frances Harrison’s important new
book on Sri Lanka, Still Counting The
Dead is published this week. It was sent to me at its proof stage, to read.
Such was the elegance of the prose that I read it voraciously in one sitting. I
did not know its author, but I recognised the passionate commitment that this
slight, energetic Englishwoman had for the vanished dead of Sri Lanka’s killing
fields. Sri Lanka, that distant land where I was born and whose name is a song
of childhood memory, a love though lost impossible to erase. I was stunned to
find a stranger cared so much.

We, my family
& I, left our home many years ago when the war was still simmering out of sight. In those
days there were only riots to contend with. Some broken glass windows on a bus,
verbal abuse, a stone or two been thrown. Then, suddenly I saw some Singhalese
youths set fire to a Tamil man. My father saw this too and also the writing on
the wall. And so with the violence a hair’s breath away, we left.

What happened
next is familiar history and, depending on which side you were on, the story
differs. The Singhalese majority had their version while the Tamils, some of
them, hounded for years, took matters into their own hands. Who amongst us can
blame them? Which of us can take the moral high ground over what happened next?
For of course what happened next was civil war.

The newly formed
Tamil Tigers, beaten and hounded, psychologically and economically (their university
careers and job prospects becoming non existent), took what they believed to be
the only course of action by pitting violence against violence. Was it any
surprise that grim death followed? That the chief casualty was innocence itself?
Or that the great dark heart of revenge and bitterness took a strangle hold on
the entire country’s psyche? Around the world today all Sri Lankan’s have a
‘view’ on the subject of the war even if they don’t voice it. Often this view
is painfully at odds with the views of their fellow countrymen. No other civil
war has managed to create such an astonishing cacophony of discordant voices
and Frances Harrison is already finding this out.

Having spent
time witnessing and interviewing victims and relatives of the dead along with
decent Singhalese who have helped Tamils in their hour of need, Harrison has raised
a clear voice reporting on the violence that took place on both sides of the
divide. We know that both Tamil Tigers and Singhalese hard liners are at fault.
That after the British left, long before any war started, each successive
majority government persecuted innocent Tamils for decades. From this seething crater
of injustice came the Tamil Tigers who, living by the sword, using their own
people as cannon fodder, walked into the trap of becoming the aggressor. Losing
what little sympathy they had from the International community they were labelled
the terrorists they had become. Violence had cut its inevitable path to hell.

And now the war
is over. All the Tamil Tigers are dead. And it isn’t easy to be critical of the
dead. Still, in spite of this difficulty Harrison manages to take a balanced
view. But it isn’t easy, the Tamil people are sensitive and some do not take
kindly to what she has to say. For
while understanding what led them along this terrible road, the truth remains
that no sane person can support any further desire for violence. The Tamil
diaspora, their dignity twice violated, their homeland littered with land
mines, their children maimed and killed, now, more than ever, need help to move
away from anger. As do, interestingly enough, the disgraced Singhalese elite. The
sad truth is that all this hatred, violence and grief, has worked its way
through the skin of the country and into its blood stream, heading straight for
the heart and head of the nation.

Thousands of
corpses lie in mass graves created by the Singhalese military while the child
soldiers, recruited by the Tigers, add to their numbers. Thus far the diaspora
on both sides seems unwilling to engage with these shocking issues. Touch on
them at your peril. For who will admit the great wrong done by so few to so
many? Can the Singhalese elite stop using the anthem of
‘They-Were-All-Terrorists-So-We-Killed-Them’, and look at what they started all those years ago when
the British left? Can the Tiger supporter abandon the crossed gun flag for
another less aggressive symbol?

In order for a
healing process to begin all white vans should be clamped, all weapons, both real and
psychological, must be laid down. While memory, that most gracious of human
qualities, needs inviting in with a flight of angels called up to sing the dead
to rest. Frances Harrison’s book Still
Counting The Dead is the first of those angels. Ignoring her words would be
an act of monumental foolishness on the part of the Sri Lankan community, for
she is one of the few messengers we have.

Memories of
injustice do not simply go away. Take a look at the beautiful film Nostalgia For The Light, about Chile’s
disappeared and you will see the infinite extent of human remembrences and its
refusal to be denied. Effort is what is needed. The effort of admission. Reading
Still Counting The Dead is a start.

1 comment
:

"All weapons, both real and psychological, must be laid down"--Surely, there's no other way, but I wonder how we are to do this? Where is there a safe place to make ourselves vulnerable?

I've been searching in vain to make connections, bridges, most recently via the Colombo Telegraph. The comments are the virtual equivalent of a bar room brawl. All reasonable attempts to join the conversation are ignored.

There is a lot of enthusiastic name calling and preaching to the choir, but apparently zero interest in meeting each other half way.

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Author Bio

Roma Tearne is a Sri Lankan born novelist and film maker living in the UK. She left Sri Lanka with her family, at the start of the civil unrest during the 1960s. She trained as a painter & filmmaker at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford and then was Leverhulme artist in residence at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Subsequently she was awarded an AHRC Fellowship and worked for three years in museums around Europe on a project accessing narrative within the collections.

She has written six novels. Her fifth, The Road To Urbino was published by Little Brown in June 2012 to coincide with the premier of her film of that name at the National Gallery in London. She has been short-listed for the Costa, the Kirimaya & LA Times book prize and long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2011 and, in 2012, the Asian Man Booker. Her sixth novel will be out in April 2015